I absolutely love Ben Cowell-Tomas’s Lightplot, a 3D light painting system. Here’s how it works: an animation is imported from 3DS Max into his custom software which, in turn, drives a robotic arm to draw each frame with an LED in a 3D space. The software also controls a DSLR camera to take long exposure photographs of each frame of the animation. Ben documented the build process in great detail and also shows off what the machine is capable of in some beautiful animations, embedded below:

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.